Most of us have felt it.
You are in shemoneh esrei. Your mind is drifting. And somewhere in the back of your head — or the front of it — is your phone.
A missed call. A text preview. An email you shouldn't open until later. A news alert. That video someone sent you two minutes before davening started.
The phone is silent, but the notifications are still there, quietly pulling at your attention.
Rabbi Daniel Glatstein and Mint Media released a short film that takes that experience and makes it visible.
The premise is simple.
Every phone notification you might get during davening — the fraud alert, the scam call, the alarm going off next to you, the political clip, the ridiculous ad, the robocall about your car's warranty — is played by an actual person, standing in front of you, demanding your attention.
It is very funny.
Until it isn't.
The Question the Film Keeps Returning To
The film keeps coming back to one moment: a waiter, quietly at first and then insistently, asking what do you want?
That is the question shemoneh esrei is really asking.
Not what the world wants to sell us. Not what the next alert wants us to look at. Not what an algorithm somewhere has decided we should feel next.
What do we want?
That is the question we walked into shul to answer.
Worth the Four Minutes
The film is short. It is worth the four minutes.
And the next time we walk into shul with our phone in our pocket, maybe it is worth remembering that every one of those notifications, if we let it, will step right up in front of us — and ask for the attention we came here to give to something else.